On International Women'sDay I wanted to take a second to thank all of the incredibly brave, talented, smart and beautiful women over the years who have been SuicideGirls and SuicideGirls Hopefuls.

Thank you for sharing your lives, bearing your bodies and souls with us and for believing in SuicideGirls.

The sense of hope and pride and belonging that I have because of this community bolsters me every day. I am so grateful to all of you for being there, sharing and supporting each other and unabashedly being yourselves.

I read a quote by Junot Diaz the other day that resonated with me super strongly.

"If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."

Growing up I felt like a monster. I didn't see anyone who looked like me, no dark haired girls with glasses and freckles and long noses were on my TV or billboards. There was no place where I belonged. I couldn't play sports, I sucked at math, I was not popular enough to get asked to dances and the suburban picket fence future seemed as unwelcoming as high school.

So I embraced becoming a monster, I used it as protection, relished in it, if I was a monster I would be the scariest fucking monster a 5' soft spoken girl could be. I put metal in my face and dyed my hair unnatural hues and gave myself fucked up haircuts, wore black and ill fitting clothes. Punk rock and literature became my salvation. The outsider is the tragic hero of all great stories. My heroes were Holden Caulfield, PonyBoy Curtis and Dean Moriarty. My life would be a tragic fuck you that would make all of them sorry that they wasted my potential. A girl could dream, kind of.

There were no female protagonists of the books that I read or the music I listened to. Girls were mostly absent. When they were included, at best they were mysterious beauties at worst they were cruel tormentors or shrewish bitches who's only pleasure in life was inflicting pain. My literary view of women coupled with the realities of high school girl heirarchy painted my sex and by proxy myself in a not very positive light.

High school was a beautiful disaster, but then I went to college, lucked into a career that suited me and I found a support system. Things got better.

Until they didn't. Your 20's are a fucking rollercoaster. Seriously. Try to enjoy the ride and know that you are strong enough to get through it.

I found myself back in Portland, lost and sad and with no plan and no where to fit. Feeling more like a monster than I had ever before. Maybe because I was so sad, and hopeless, through my tear stained glasses I could see that there were lots of other monsters like me and they were beautiful.

I wanted to create a space that they could see each other. I wanted to hold a mirror up to my fellow monsters so that they could see that they were gorgeous the way that they were. We didn't have to play into the narrative we were given, we weren't the bitchy shrew or the mysterious tormentor. We didn't have to play into high school girl competition. Maybe if we shared our stories with one another we could be the hero of our great stories. So I created SuicideGirls.

And you came, and you shared and you are the mirrors for other girls to see themselves and what they can become.

We are almost 3,000 SuicideGirls and hundreds of thousands of hopefuls from every continent including Antarctica. We are many. We are strong. We don't need to fit in to their stories. We have our own and they are more interesting.